Adventures in the Orgasmatron (47 page)

The orgone box promised to channel these cosmic forces, which is why Alfred Kazin later mocked Isaac Rosenfeld’s homemade contraption as a telephone box with a line to a higher power. But Reich saw orgone energy as a scientific reality: the idea of “God” was just a projection of man’s awareness of the cosmic orgone ocean that surrounded the earth. However, Brady was right to notice that this distinction between science and mysticism was not always clear in his writing, nor to his followers. In
The Triumph of the Therapeutic
, Philip Rieff argued that the seeds of an ecstatic religiosity were always hidden in Reich’s thought, “despite many clever, even bizarre, rituals of avoidance.”
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When Brady skeptically questioned one of Reich’s followers about the existence of orgone energy, he said, “Christ, Mrs. Brady, Reich’s seen it—it’s blue.”
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“Mass orders for books are coming in from the West Coast,” Reich noted in his journal in October 1945.
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But he was an unwitting guru, far removed from the avant-garde who eagerly consumed his ideas on both coasts, and he lived a largely reclusive life, surrounding himself with a very few followers. Reich disappeared to Maine for increasingly long portions of the year, and conducted experiments with orgone energy in the Student Laboratory, a building he’d constructed on a newly acquired 200-acre estate four miles west of Dodge Pond, in the Rangeley Lakes region of western Maine. He thought of himself as a scientist, not a leader of a sex cult, and went to considerable effort to differentiate his political philosophy from anarchism.

Though Reich’s ideas had national reach, the disciples in Reich’s immediate “cult of no little influence,” as Brady referred to his circle, were few in number. In 1945 Reich had only three trainees: Theodore Wolfe, Alexander Lowen, and an osteopath, William Thorburn. The following year Reich met Elsworth Baker, a senior doctor suffering from depression who worked at Marlboro State Hospital in New Jersey. Baker became Reich’s most faithful adherent and would help him attract many more.

“He loomed large and powerful,” Baker recalled in his memoir of his first encounter with Reich, “had a slow easy walk, snow white hair, and a florid face with piercing kindly eyes.”
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Reich X-rayed Baker’s chest to see if his diaphram was free. He then asked him to take off his clothes, and began to prod Baker in the ribs and press down on his chest to get him to breathe more deeply. “It was downright frightening,” Baker admitted. Reich ordered him to hit the couch and bite on a leather roll, and demanded that Baker try to hurt him by twisting the skin of his forearm with both hands. “He tried to make me angry,” Baker wrote, “had me scream, and did succeed in making me sob as I had never before in my life.”
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Reich diagnosed low energy—if he hadn’t come to see him when he did, Reich said, Baker wouldn’t have lived more than five years. He prescribed to Baker an orgone energy accumulator to redress his bioenergetic imbalance and demanded that he sign an affidavit acknowledging the device as experimental. When Baker said that wouldn’t be necessary and that his word was enough, Reich said, “Do you think you’re a king or something?” (It took six weeks of daily irradiations before Baker felt a warm tingling in the accumulator).
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Reich said his fee was between twenty and thirty dollars and asked Baker how much he’d like to pay. After he settled on twenty-five dollars, Reich began teasing him about the money, and for a long time after, when Baker paid, Reich would pass the bills under his nose to smell.

Baker’s wife, Marguerite, also began to see Reich for treatment. Reich, who always called people’s wives by their maiden names, referred to her as Miss Maybury and, according to Baker, developed a small crush on her. On several occasions he tried to seduce her—unsuccessfully, according to her husband—and he painted two Chagall-like pictures of her. One of these, which used to hang in Baker’s office, depicts a redheaded woman lying naked in a bed of poppies, her conical breasts massaged by spiraling and pulsating blue rays of orgone energy.

Two weeks into Baker’s treatment Reich suggested that he start doing orgone therapy on his own patients. (He hadn’t yet attained the orgasm reflex himself; it was three months and fifty-five sessions before he claimed to.) In his experiments with the new technique, Baker converted five of the physicians who worked under him to Reich, most notably Chester Raphael and Albert Duvall. The medical director at Marlboro State Hospital became perturbed by this cultish takeover—he thought that the hospital was becoming “a den of Reichian iniquity”—and he refused Baker’s request to experiment with the orgone accumulator on the premises. (The director of social services, a social worker, and the hospital chaplain were all known to have orgone accumulators in their hospital quarters.) He had heard the false rumors that Reich had been institutionalized, that he was undergoing treatment for schizophrenia, and that vegetotherapy involved the masturbation of patients.

In May 1948, Baker was called before a medical tribunal and accused of quackery and the doctors under him at Marlboro State were all fired. Dr. Cotton, New Jersey’s deputy commissioner for institutions and agencies, admitted that Baker might have helped some of his patients with orgone therapy, but he imputed this to Baker’s own “enthusiasm and suggestion” rather than to the method itself—“You could help them with an electric belt,” he claimed.
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He asked Baker whether he masturbated patients and said that he’d heard that some of them screamed with pain and emerged from therapy sessions covered in bruises. “Yes, sometimes there are bruises,” Baker admitted, “some people bruise very easily,” but no one had ever complained, he added. Cotton dismissed Reich’s methods as “a mixture of quackery, chiropractics and Christian Science.”
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Baker resigned soon after in order to devote the rest of his life to Reich’s work.

“Of course we are exciting patients sexually,” Reich told an audience of coworkers assembled in his Forest Hills home, in response to Cotton’s charge, “but not with their dirty fantasy…And we don’t manipulate the patient’s genitals; but if we did, again, we wouldn’t do it with their dirty fantasy.”
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When the American Association for Medical Orgonomy was founded in 1947, at Reich’s suggestion, a charter was drafted to safeguard the organization against “medical orgone quacks.” The implication was that rather than being a distortion, Reich’s science was itself subject to—and already the victim of—distortion. The charter stated that all members must go through “personal restructuring” (that is, vegetotherapy) before admission, and that they should accept the orgasm theory, orgone energy, and the sexual rights of children. In a parody of the government loyalty oaths, the bylaws asserted, furthermore, that members “must not be a member of a church or a subversive political party” or abuse “the sexuality of patients.”
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A month after the
Harper’s Magazine
piece appeared, Brady published another article, this time in
The New Republic
. “The Strange Case of Wilhelm Reich” also ridiculed Reich’s theories, especially the orgone box and Reich’s cancer cure claims. Under the title ran the line, “The man who blames both neuroses and cancer on unsatisfactory sexual activities has been repudiated by only one scientific journal.”
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It was a much more devastating and direct attack on Reich than Brady’s
Harper’s
essay. At the top of his own copy of Brady’s
New Republic
piece Reich scrawled a message to posterity: “THE SMEAR.”

Before Brady dismissed him in the national press as a fraud and a madman, accusations that he would never be able to shake off, his ideas had seemed to be getting traction. Just before Brady’s visit, Reich had written to A. S. Neill: “I am looking calmly into the future and hopefully too. There is only one thing I fear. That is, some crooked frame-up, some abysmal
Gemeinheit
[dirty trick] which may still hit me in the back and destroy my work. But we are all alert and watchful.”
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He thought that Brady’s article constituted just such a setup and later blamed Brady for his change of fortune in America. “Thus, without wanting it, we have been brought to the attention of a very broad public,” Reich wrote to a colleague.
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He complained in his journal: “They brought me into the public eye in America in a shabby way.”
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“The Reichites,” Brady wrote of the group that was crystallizing around Reich, “declare that orgastic impotence is the primary cause of cancer, all neuroses, all psychoses, impotence, frigidity, perversions, cardiovascular hypertension, hyperthyroidism, constipation, hemorrhoids, epilepsy, peptic ulcer, obesity, narcotic addiction, alcoholism and the common cold.”
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Brady portrays Reich as a quack before mentioning incredulously that, even so, he was listed in
American Men of Science
(“First swallows!” Reich wrote when he heard of his inclusion), and his work was discussed in such high places as the
Journal of the American Medical Association
and the
American Journal of Psychiatry
.
Politics
and
The Nation
had also carried enthusiastic accounts of his sexual theories. Only one scientific journal had repudiated them:
Psychosomatic Medicine
characterized orgone theory as “a surrealistic creation” and dismissed
The Function of the Orgasm
as “nuttier than a fruitcake.”
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Brady, apparently unaware of Reich and Fenichel’s earlier collaboration, was astounded that Fenichel, one of the most prominent of the Californian exile analysts, “granted Reich considerable standing” in
The Psychoanalytic Theory of Neurosis
(1945), which she described as the “current bible of the American Psychoanalytic Association.”
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Reich, Brady wrote, had more patients than he could treat. In her article, Brady called for the American Psychiatric Association to regulate psychoanalysis, or for it to be under state control (as it was in Norway after the campaign against Reich there), so that a gullible public might be protected from threats such as that represented by Reich and the bogus aphrodisiacal box he sold. Brady portrays Reich’s machine as entirely without worth, less a scientific implement than his own personal piggybank.

Brady’s article was reprinted in the
Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic
(an editorial pointedly referred to Mr. rather than Dr. Reich), and in December 1947 was abridged in
Everybody’s Digest
, which circulated in the millions, under the title “Is the World Sexually Sick?” (Brady had pointed out that Reich thought mankind “endemically neurotic and sexually sick.”) Brady unleashed a tidal wave of other titles reporting on Reich’s supposed sexual cure-all, which made him notorious beyond avant-garde circles. An article in
Collier’s
in January 1948 contained the statement “The orgone and the accumulator can lick anything from cancer to the common cold, according to Reich.”
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Reich issued a press release correcting some of Brady’s statements, but no one printed it. In a long article in the
Journal of Orgonomy
, “Emotional Plague Versus Orgone Biophysics” (1948), Wolfe refuted the negative aspects of what he called (echoing the Norwegian press’s hounding of Reich), “The 1947 Campaign.” He insisted that the Orgone Institute Research Laboratories, the distributing organization for accumulators founded in 1945, was not a sexual racket but a nonprofit organization, with all profits plowed back into research. Reich made no claims to be able to cure cancer, Wolfe wrote (rather misleadingly, in light of previous statements by Reich), but attacked the underlying malaise from which tumors sprang; and some of the accumulators with which he did this were lent rather than rented to those who couldn’t afford them.

Reich detected a Communist conspiracy behind Brady’s attack. “It was typically communist, mudslinging propaganda under the guise of a factual, objective portrayal,” he wrote. He dismissed Brady as “an intelligent but obviously sex hungry woman” and wrote in his diary, “It is obvious that Mrs. Brady believes that I am the only man who could help her to achieve an orgasm, which she so desperately needs. The tragedy is: she is not aware of her need.”
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In September 1952, Reich wrote an angry, rambling, stream-of-consciousness note to himself recalling Brady’s visit.

Now I knew well why she said this when I recall her sitting there in front of me in the easy chair, with glowing eyes, glowing from genital frustration, with eyes as I have seen them many thousands of times in people of both sexes, of all ages and professions…who expected, I say, orgastic potency from me, expressing this yearning clearly in her eyes as she looks at me, and then smearing me up and down in public with that pornographic insinuation about the Or. accumulator which is supposed to provide orgastic potency. Thus she turned her normal, natural desire into mud, which she then throws in to my decent face.
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